Guwahati, November 30 2009: Lack of access to medicines and ignorance about the disease are the twin challenges being faced by people living with HIV and AIDS in India's northeast, where around 45,000 people are HIV positive, health experts said here Monday.

About 9,000 of the 45,000 people living with HIV have developed AIDS.

"Just take the instance of Assam where you have 3,752 HIV-positive people, and of this just 2,205 are registered with the Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) centres.

This gives one an idea that more than 1,500 people carrying the virus are not covered by the ART mechanism and could be really vulnerable," S.I.Ahmed, head of the AIDS Prevention Society, a community healthcare group in Assam, told IANS.

Although it is not a cure, ART is a combination of medicines that helps a person living with HIV to fight off infections and live a longer life.

Besides, ART also significantly impacts transmission by reducing the viral load concentration and minimising risk of transmission to their sexual partners.

"Awareness levels in the region about HIV/AIDS is far from satisfactory and so many people carrying the virus still do not come to ART centres," Jahnabi Goswami, president of the All India Network of Positive People, said.

Goswami, 33, is one of the few women in India fighting to raise awareness about the disease and also belongs to an even smaller category of people who have publicly declared they are HIV-positive.

"Access to comprehensive care and treatment has been a distant dream for people living with HIV/AIDS in Assam," Goswami said.

The issue of inadequate access to medicines is significant as the entire globe observes World AIDS Day Tuesday with the theme this year being 'Universal Access and Human Rights'.

"We have a long way to go in terms of universal access to medicines," Ahmed said.

Stigma and taboo is another challenge facing people living with HIV/AIDS.

"There have been efforts at catering to the needs of people living with HIV/AIDS, but then we need to do more substantial things to change the mindset of the people in terms of doing away with stigma and discrimination," Manjunath Kini, a representative of the International Labour Organization's HIV/AIDS cell, said.

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